Search Results for: chile

Jean Boudeguer. Clay: Start-Up Chile, Cumplo, and Accounting in Latin America, Ep 62

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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As Start-Up Chile’s first Executive Director, Jean Boudeguer was one of the first people I met when I arrived in Chile. Jean is actually the only ex-Start-Up Chile Executive Director who had not yet appeared on Crossing Borders! Jean faced unique challenges as Start-Up Chile’s first director. He had to build the program, yet didn’t have any previous governmental experience. After Start-Up Chile, Jean went on to build two Fintech startups, Cumplo, a peer to peer lending business and Clay, an accounting software for Latin America.

I sat down with Jean on this episode to discuss how he transitioned from a traditional career as a software engineer to working in the government and finally to becoming an entrepreneur. Jean understands the challenges and benefits of working in the private vs. public sector in Chile and what it’s like to build businesses. Check out this episode of Crossing Borders to learn from one of the main actors responsible for helping build up Chile’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.

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Horacio Melo, Solarity: From Start-Up Chile to Solar Energy, Ep 60

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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Horacio Melo and I have been trying to organize a time to do this podcast for a few years and I’m excited to finally be able to share it. Once the Executive Director of Start-Up Chile, Horacio went on to build his own startup – just two months after becoming a Dad for the first time. Horacio knows what it takes to build a great company; after all, he watched and mentored over 1000 startups as they passed through Start-Up Chile. His solar energy company, Solarity, has raised three rounds of investment, starting with US$650K in their seed round, then adding a US$18M in follow on funding.

Horacio can speak to the difficulty of selling an innovative business idea to conservative corporates in Chile and Latin America, despite Chile being one of the best places in the world for solar energy. He also discusses his transition from corporate jobs to entrepreneurship, the importance of culture in building a sustainable startup, and what he learned as Executive Director of Start-Up Chile.

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Ep 49: A Case Study of Ecommerce Opportunities in Chile and Latin America

Category : Chile, Crossing Borders Podcast
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One of my most popular blog posts is my ecommerce case study from when some friends and I started an ecommerce business in 2012. It gets hundreds of people viewing it each month and leads to lots of questions on twitter, linkedin and my blog.

I covered how we decided to launch an ecommerce, how we picked a product and how we validated the idea without spending lots money out of pocket. My goal was to share how we see the market and how you can validate any business idea without spending months and thousands of dollars to do it.

So what did we sell and what was the store called? We sold condoms on La Condonería.

In this episode, we cover the original case study, along with changes since I wrote the original post in 2015 and Magma Partners view on ecommerce in the region.

I hope you enjoy this style of episode of Crossing Borders. Please give me feedback in the comments or on social media on whether you did. If enough people like it, I can go through other industries that are popular in Latin America.

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Doing Business in Chile: What You Need to Know

Category : Chile
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Note: It might seem funny, but I’ve never written a standalone post about doing business in Chile. If you’re interested in going deeper, please check out the Chile category on the blog, as there’s 8 years of content about what it’s like, delving deep on banking, real estate, startups, investing and more.

Chile is a long, thin country at the tip of Latin America that is widely considered one of the best countries in the region to do business. Across several indicators in the World Bank’s Doing Business Report, Chile beats out the regional competition. In 2018, Chile ranked 55th in the world on the World Bank’s Doing Business report, coming in just after Mexico, which ranked 49th. However, in recent years, Chile’s business-friendly reputation has slid from 34th to 55th which has been subject to some controversy.

Still, Chile is undoubtedly one of the most influential economies in the region, despite its small size. Chile’s population reaches just 17 million people, but the country is extremely centralized. The capital, Santiago, is home to 7 million people, or one-third of the total population. By comparison, São Paulo, the biggest city in Brazil, has over 21 million inhabitants – more than the entire country of Chile.

Chile’s overall GDP was US$247B in 2016, 28% of which is made up of exports. Chile is the world’s largest exporter of copper, and it also exports lithium, fish, and wine. While Chile’s overall GDP appears small beside giants like Brazil (US$1.8T) and Mexico (US$1.1T), its population is more than ten times smaller. When measured per capita, Chile’s GDP is the second-highest in the region after Uruguay.

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